CREATING SHARED VALUE

With R387 million shared with our Sisonke Employee Empowerment Scheme and R387 million shared with the Nkulo Community Partnership Trust in our first year as an independent business, we are living up to our promises.

Because when we create value, we share it.

That’s impact with purpose. thungela.com

Safika Holdings

www.safika.co.za

THE future structure of South Africa’s manganese fields in the Northern Cape might be in the hands of Saki Macozoma’s Safika Holdings, or at least partially. The group’s stake in the 3.5 million ton (Mt) a year Tshipi Borwa manganese mine, held via Ntsimbintle Mining, gives it a useful bargaining chip as the mine’s majority shareholder, Australian-listed Jupiter Mines, is considering ways to unlock value from the mine and the region. The country’s manganese industry is highly fragmented, which is a consequence of the successful black empowerment that occurred in the sector. Ironically, success for the South African government makes for less optimal business outcomes, especially given the constraints of the government-owned rail and port utility, Transnet. Transnet wants to open up the Saldanha-to-Sishen rail route to new entrants when, in fact, consolidation may result in a more efficient but no less empowering use of available resources. How, though, to consolidate the 10 producing mines that exist today (from two in 2004)? One way might be to repackage Jupiter Mines, in which Ntsimbintle has a 21% stake, and bring it to the JSE in a dual-listed structure. That would enable the industry to independently benchmark the price of its assets against which to conduct transactions. Jupiter Mines drafted in former Durban Roodepoort Deep CEO Ian Murray and Australian business executive Brad Rogers to examine exactly that strategy. Much hangs on a successful outcome. For one, consolidation brings a far more rational approach to supply and may in turn lead to a less volatile manganese price. Tshipi Borwa is an asset for which it’s worth taking the time. It has a total life of 100 years while in the shorter term, it can lift output to five million tons annually.

Life Of Saki

Sakumzi ‘Saki’ Macozoma was born in Port Elizabeth, now Gqeberha, in 1957. An organiser with the South African Students’ Movement, he was jailed for his anti-apartheid activities on Robben Island, where he was befriended and mentored by Nelson Mandela. Macozoma was elected as an ANC member of Parliament in 1994 and in 1996 became MD of state-run logistics group Transnet. His corporate life has included being deputy chair of Standard Bank.

CEO GoviEx Uranium

GOVIEX will this year know if efforts to develop the Madaouela uranium project in Niger have been worth the painstaking number of years. That’s because Daniel Major will be casting about for an estimated $350m in project funding. A feasibility study published in September put production at 2.67 million pounds a year and further trimmed preproduction capital to $343m. Promisingly, in the context of $40 to $50/lb uranium oxide spot prices, total operating costs net of byproducts (before royalties) are $29.94/t. Madaouela is also one of the world’s largest uranium oxide deposits in the world’s fifth largest producer in a market that is clearly starting to incentivise production, so what’s not to love? According to Major, the market stacks up relatively simply: 190m lb is consumed annually against production of 122m lb. Inventories exist but utilities aren’t parting with them. Given this increasingly illiquid market, the deficit is expected to bite around 2025, which is when Madaouela is scheduled to commission. Sprott Capital, the Canadian fund, is clearly a uranium bull. It has some $3bn of the material in its Sprott Physical Uranium Trust and in October presided over a doubling in a GoviEx share placement that totalled C$10.5m. GoviEx has another prospect in Mutanga, an open pittable heap leach asset in Zambia worth over two million pounds a year in production, and the Falea exploration site in Mali also containing 63m lb of copper, albeit at a slim 0.2% grade. But one question nags: GoviEx’s shares lost 50% in 2022 — not the ideal backdrop ahead of a funding year. One other quibble is Niger’s sporadic Islamic insurgency. Major, who toasts the country’s ‘get the job done’ approach to mining, says this kind of political foment is far from Madaouela.

Life Of Daniel

Major studied at Camborne School of Mines in Cornwall, once the capital of the UK’s mining industry. In his 30 years in mining, he’s worked at Rio Tinto’s Rössing uranium mine in Namibia and for Anglo American Platinum in South Africa. He then dipped out of the operational side of things and took up a role as a mining analyst with HSBC and then subsequently JP Morgan Chase. Since then, he’s held several roles in Russia, Canada and South America, and has been with GoviEx since 2012.

COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

Economic Freedom Fighters www.effonline.org.za

IN 2012, Julius Malema – then leader of the ANC Youth League – alarmed investors with demands that mines in South Africa be nationalised. Fast-forward 10 years and the 41-year-old – now the commander-in-chief of the populist and left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) – still has a great deal to say about mines, especially since nationalisation of all sectors of the economy remains EFF policy. During the 10-year commemoration of the Marikana massacre in August, the EFF reopened old wounds, once again accusing President Cyril Ramaphosa of premeditated murder for having ordered the police to act against striking mine workers. Ramaphosa was a shareholder at the Lonmin mine in Marikana at the time. The EFF, however, has lately focused its attention on the electorate in the Northern Cape – a province richly endowed with manganese, iron and zinc. The party has set out to provoke the communities’ sentiment against mining companies in the province. In June, the EFF handed over a list of demands to the management of Kumba Iron Ore in the province, claiming to act on behalf of former employees and residents. One of the demands was that employees who had lost their jobs 10 years ago be reinstated. In September, Malema addressed a provincial political gathering in Mothibistad, near Kuruman, telling delegates that the Northern Cape is a strategic province in terms of the EFF’s agenda to return the land to the people. “It is a province rich with potential, yet our people live as if they are in a desert,” he said.

Life Of Julius

Malema hails from the Limpopo province in the northern parts of South Africa. He joined the ANC Youth League at the age of 14, where he quickly rose through the provincial leadership ranks until he became national leader in 2008 at a controversial and chaotic elective conference. He was found guilty of hate speech in 2010 and again in 2011. In 2012, the ANC expelled him for sowing discord in the party due to his reckless populist utterances. Malema then founded the EFF, a radical left-wing party proclaiming it would nationalise privately owned land and all sectors of the economy once it got into power.

Minister Mineral Resources And Energy

South Africa www.dmr.gov.za

LAST year marked the end of the South African mining sector’s honeymoon with Minerals and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe, whose replacement of the scandal-tainted Mosebenzi Zwane in 2018 was initially welcomed. The relationship had long been on the rocks as the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) collapsed into dysfunction, with logjams for mining rights and related applications while policymaking remained muddled amid the painfully slow relaxation of regulations to enable self-generation projects. When Mantashe failed to give his scheduled keynote address to the Joburg Indaba, a mining conference, in October, it was viewed in some quarters as the showing of a ministerial middle finger to the industry. Still, Mantashe’s department made headway on some fronts. It announced in November that the applications backlog had been slashed to 2,625 from over 5,000 in early 2021. The DMRE also scuppered its chaotic plans to tender for a built-from-scratch mining cadastre and now seems to have reluctantly yielded to the industry’s preferred option of an off-the-shelf system. Mantashe also courted controversy in his typically combative style, accusing state-run power utility Eskom of trying to overthrow the state through its failure to reliably keep the lights on. That was seen as a key trigger for the departure of Group CEO André de Ruyter. But Mantashe’s political star remains bright: at the ANC’s Elective Conference in December he was re-elected party chairperson. His support of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa also seems to have landed him responsibility for Eskom which will be moved to his energy ministry.

Life Of Gwede

Mantashe is a former miner and trade unionist who once led the National Union of Mineworkers. In recent decades, he has been a political heavyweight in South Africa’s ruling ANC as its secretary general and chairperson. By turns jovial and gruff, he is thin-skinned and known for bizarre and controversial statements. Hailing from Lower Cala village in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, his early anti-apartheid activism drew him to the Student Christian Movement. Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy since 2018, he has had a roller-coaster relationship with a mining sector that initially embraced him but soon tired of the department’s collapse into dysfunction.